Long Session V: Time, Space, Archives
Observing Web Archives
The Case for an Ethnographic Study of Web Archiving
Jessica Ogden Susan Halford
University of Southampton University of Southampton
Southampton, UK Southampton, UK
jessica.ogden@soton.ac.uk susan.halford@soton.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
This paper makes the case for studying the work of web archivists,
in an effort to explore the ways in which practitioners shape the
preservation and maintenance of the archived Web in its various
forms. An ethnographic approach is taken through the use of ob-
servation, interviews and documentary sources over the course
of several weeks in collaboration with web archivists, engineers
and managers at the Internet Archive - a private, non-profit digital
library that has been archiving the Web since 1996. The concept
of web archival labour is proposed to encompass and highlight the
ways in which web archivists (as both networked human and non-
human agents) shape and maintain the preserved Web through
work that is often embedded in and obscured by the complex tech-
nical arrangements of collection and access. As a result, this engage-
ment positions web archives as places of knowledge and cultural
production in their own right, revealing new insights into the per-
formative nature of web archiving that have implications for how
these data are used and understood.1
KEYWORDS
web archiving, knowledge production, STS, materiality, information
labour
ACM Reference format:
Jessica Ogden, Susan Halford, and Leslie Carr. 2017. Observing Web Archives.
In Proceedings of WebSci ’17, Troy, NY, USA., June 25–28, 2017, 10 pages.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3091478.3091506
1 INTRODUCTION
The World Wide Web has emerged as the preeminent mechanism for
global communication, political, economic and cultural exchange
and more. Yet, at the same time, the Web is ephemeral. For a medium
that has become pre-eminent, its dynamism and transience has be-
come increasingly worrisome. These concerns have been illustrated
in various longitudinal studies of link rot [55] and investigations
which found that during a period between 2009 and 2012, on aver-
age 11% of online resources shared on social media failed to resolve
one year later [60]. In this context, it is increasingly claimed that
1 Thispaper is based on data collected and fieldwork undertaken by the first author as
part of their PhD research.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution International 4.0 License.
WebSci ’17, June 25–28, 2017, Troy, NY, USA.
© 2017 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-4896-6/17/06.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3091478.3091506
299
WebSci '17, June 25-28, 2017, Troy, NY, USA
Leslie Carr
University of Southampton
Southampton, UK
lac@ecs.soton.ac.uk
the ephemerality of the Web demands intervention to preserve
web content - in web archives - that reconstruct sites and the ‘web
experience’ for posterity [2]. However, there has been rather less
attention to the nature of this intervention: how it is done and why
this matters. This paper explores the critical decisions being made
now that will shape future generations’ ability to understand the
history of the Web.
1.1 Web Archiving
Web archiving has roots in a wider digital preservation movement
which emerged in the 1980s-1990s, led by memory institutions to
develop strategies for addressing the rise of personal computing
and the impact of digital artefacts on their abilities to capture and
preserve ‘records of social phenomena’ [61]. This was particularly
fuelled by fears over the so-called ‘digital dark ages,’ a term first
used by Kuny [41] to describe a scenario where the development
pace of technologies (used to produce digital objects) outweighs
that of the investment in technologies, infrastructures and policies
to preserve them long-term. As the world’s information and com-
munication platforms are increasingly born-digital and online, a
diverse community of practitioners have positioned web archives as
key to capturing and preserving digital cultural heritage, ensuring
stability and access to pre-existing web resources and facilitating
new knowledge via scholarly research. Web archives in their vari-
ous forms - including social media archives - have thus become a
sort of ‘prosthesis’ for the Web and a necessary pre-condition for
any research into the Web(s) of the past and near-present.2
The history of web archiving has been documented to varying
degrees in existing overviews [9, 13, 77] which chart the emer-
gence of a field of practice around web archiving. Each have used
a series of factors to characterise the domain over time, including:
the tools and technologies used, the frequency and scale of selec-
tion/collection methods (e.g. broad versus targeted) and the various
motivations behind the creation of web archives. These motiva-
tions may reinforce and represent, at least in part, a continuation of
classical interpretations and analogue conceptions of the value and
role of libraries and archives as institutions that provide access to
cultural heritage, information and knowledge resources; facilitate
evidence-based accountability and promote community memory
and identity, amongst others [18, 26].
Web archiving projects have spanned from the large-scale collec-
tion of web resources by organisations such as the Internet Archive
2 Inspiration
for this analogy is taken from Derrida’s [20] treatment of ‘technological
devices for archiving’ as prostheses for memory formation and storage.
Long Session V: Time, Space, Archives
WebSci ’17, June 25–28, 2017, Troy, NY, USA.
and national libraries and archives, to networked ‘rogue’ collec-
tives such as Archive Team3 and DataRefuge,4 and the individual
efforts of activists and scholars creating web archives for their own
purposes. Surveys of the field reveal a growing number of organisa-
tions that are web archiving, albeit with limited staff-time resources
and with the majority of respondents using some form of external
service to collect or manage their web archives [3, 52].
Much of the focus of the web archiving community has been
on the continued development of technologies and practices for
web collection development [35], with an increased attention in
recent years on facilitating the scholarly use of web archives [21].
Web archiving has thus become representative of an interdisci-
plinary space where practitioners and scholars from a range of
backgrounds (e.g. libraries, archives, information science, engineer-
ing and computer science) come together with scholars from a
variety of disciplines (humanities, social sciences and computer
science) to study the Web, its application and the users who derive
value from its use.
This research examines this space from the perspective of web
archival practitioners with the aim of documenting the practices
that determine and create the archived Web within the context of
the Internet Archive. From the point of view of Web Science, web
archiving should not be seen as merely a series of technical solu-
tions to the short-comings of the Web’s infrastructure, but rather
as an assemblage of contingent sociotechnical practices that shape
what is known about the Web. These practices - and the entangle-
ment of both human and non-human actors - are important for
understanding the affordances of web archives and their implica-
tions for interpreting an increasingly dynamic Web. This type of
engagement raises wide-ranging epistemological questions con-
cerning the role of the web archive (and the archivist) in shaping
knowledge about the Web. From this perspective, the mechanisms
and circumstances surrounding the production of web archives are
therefore fundamental to understanding them as ‘new forms of
social data’ [45, p.31].
1.2 Problematising Web Archival Practices
The field of web archiving, the practices and technologies used to
facilitate the creation, maintenance and use of web archives are
all continually evolving, but not without their issues. The different
legal, economic, technical and ethical challenges to preservation
and access presented by both ‘web documents’ and social media
have led to a mix of overlapping and divergent collection and ac-
cess strategies. Existing overviews of the field [9, 48], literature
reviews [54] and best practice documents [8, 56] provide models for
mapping the general components of web archiving. However, some
of this documentation has failed to keep up to date with the pace
of web/archiving technology development, and is often limited to
specific software, tools and professional contexts (e.g. library or
bibliographic approaches to web archiving). Surveys of the field
have yielded insights into the types and number of organisations
participating in web archiving, the tools and services used, the
types of content being archived, and the availability of institutional
policy documents and staff-time resources [3, 29, 52]. These surveys
3 http://archiveteam.org
4 https://www.datarefuge.org
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provide useful information for understanding the broader landscape
of web archiving. However, by virtue of the methods used, they do
not provide in-depth information about the day-to-day decisions,
activities and processes that facilitate web archiving in practice.
Web technologies are evolving at a faster pace than that of web
preservation technologies and practice [21], presenting challenges
for preserving an ‘infinite stream with finite resources’ [42]. The
limitations of web harvesters in the face of new markup languages
(e.g. HTML5), executable content (e.g. JavaScript and Flash) and
other dynamic content (e.g. streamed multimedia, database-driven
or password-protected) all often lead to missing elements in the
representation of web resources in archives [56]. Problems for use
are often presented as issues with the ‘quality’ of web archives,
as measured by the relative ‘likeness’ between archived web ob-
jects and the ‘live web.’ As Brügger [14, p.108] has described, a
combination of both collection decisions and ‘technical problems’
leads to archived web objects that are not copies of the live web,
but rather contingent constructions where ‘the process of archiving
itself may change what is archived, thus creating something that is
not necessarily identical to what was once online.’
There is an abundance of research within the field pertaining
to improving the efficiency and quality of web crawlers, detect-
ing change in web resources and automating frequency decisions
associated with captures [64], as well as technical overviews of
crawling technologies at the time of production [51]. Yet, little re-
search exists around the interactive nature and structuring effects
of algorithmic and automated agents in decisions around what and
when to archive. Recent calls for the study of ‘archival algorithmic
systems’ [70, p.11] point towards the need to further consider the
performative nature of crawlers and other web archiving technolo-
gies, as well as the ways in which different environmental contexts
shape the technological development [40] driving collection and
access tools. Here web crawlers (non-human, automated agents,
bots, algorithms, code) are conceived as not merely passive or ob-
jective participants in the collection of web resources [47], but are
intricately implicated in the active shaping of the ‘doing’ of web
archiving.
At the heart of conflicts over the collection and use of web
archives are often problems with defining the boundaries of the
web object to be captured and studied. Whilst recognising that web
archives are by nature, inherently and necessarily incomplete [28],
they are also highly ‘subjective reconstructions’ [11, 12] of what
exists on the live Web at any given time. As argued by Dougherty
and Meyer [21], often the specific ontological and epistemologi-
cal assumptions made during the collection and curation of web
archives are either not made explicit to potential users or are seen
as an impediment to their use and/or re-use [21]. Collection deci-
sions, whether thematic or broad, domain-based harvesting [57],
the temporal dimensions of when to capture and for how long [46]
and issues over geographic [72] and language [1] coverage and
representation of the global Web(s), have all highlighted method-
ological concerns over provenance, the subjectivity of records, the
lack of transparency and metadata for harvester algorithms and
problems with the generalisability of potential research findings
based on web archives.
Long Session V: Time, Space, Archives
Observing Web Archives
Issues of provenance in web archives - the why, when, and how
web archives are collected - have inspired calls for greater documen-
tation around intent, particularly around what to preserve and why
[76]. Others have focused on calling for greater transparency in how
web archives are built, some with a particular focus on the Internet
Archive [43]. However, practices that surround the capture and
maintenance of web archives remain relatively understudied, and
for initiatives that sit outside of mainstream memory institutions,
continue to exist almost wholly unexamined. Investigations into
how curation strategies and collection tools structure the nature
of collections - for example, the timing, frequency and length of
collection - have the potential to yield insights into the contingen-
cies that lead to the archived Web(s). Recent qualitative research
on web archival appraisal practices by Summers and Punzalan [70]
underlines the value of such an approach for both situating web
archiving within wider institutional/archival paradigms, as well as
exposing undocumented practices largely missing from the archival
record. Taking a different approach, Milligan et al. [50] contribute
to a discussion of curatorial practices by reverse engineering se-
lection through a comparison of algorithmic, manual and social
media-generated web archives associated with the 2015 Canadian
Elections. These studies, plus the previously mentioned work of
Dougherty and Meyer [21], can be seen as complementary to this
research both in methodology and in their aims to address how col-
lection practices structure the nature of web archival engagement.
The following sections outline the ways in which this paper aims
to extend current knowledge of web archival practice.
1.3 Aims and Outline
This paper aims to examine the ways in which web archives and
associated practices - as sociotechnical phenomena - are structured
and organised by an array of actors and environmental factors that
actively shape the practice of archiving. This research contends
that these (often) undocumented activities and processes are criti-
cal for interpreting the affordances of web archives as contingent
reconstructions of the previously live Web.
The argument for a practice-based approach to web archiving is
further examined through a theoretical framework. This framework
draws on aspects of archival theory and Science and Technology
Studies (STS) investigations into the materiality of information
mediation practices. Here, examining web archiving from the per-
spective of the materiality of practice enables two paths of inquiry.
The first acknowledges the ways in which new knowledge is em-
bedded and produced as part of the creation of web archives; the
second addresses how practice transforms knowledge through the
maintenance of web archival systems.5
A case for the chosen methodology is then made along with a
description of the data collection, in an effort to highlight the ways
in which this research may have implications for a Web Science
approach to examining sociotechnical practices. The theoretical ap-
proach is then worked through empirical examples and discussion
drawn from vignettes of ethnographic fieldwork at the Internet
Archive. A brief summary discussion is provided that highlights
some of the broad findings at this stage of the empirical research.
5 For further inspiration into the types of inquiries enabled by a focus on the materiality
of media technologies, see Gillespie et al. [25].
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2 FRAMING PRACTICE ENGAGEMENT
Postmodernism and its application in archival and social theory
lays the groundwork for critically engaging with web archiving
as knowledge production. From this perspective, there has been a
longstanding interest in knowledge production activities where the
record is often positioned as ‘evidence of process, of activity, [and]
of transaction’ [34, p.12].
First coined by Stoler [68], ‘the archival turn’ denotes a shift from
‘archive as source’ to ‘archive as subject’, signalling wide-ranging
epistemological questions concerning the role of the archive (and
the archivist) in shaping and legitimising knowledge and particular
ways of knowing. Cook [16, p.4-5] argues that postmodern archival
theory represents a fundamental paradigm shift within a commu-
nity of practice that hitherto had been largely grounded in scientific
rationalism, ‘archival science,’ the merits of record stability and the
objective role of archivists; towards one which recognises the in-
completeness of records and attends to context and the interpretive
role of archivists in the construction of social memory. This signi-
fied a theoretical move away from the framing of archives as ‘sites
of knowledge retrieval’ towards a recognition that archives are
deeply reflective of and implicated in the production of knowledge
[68, p.90]. The conditions of historical narrative-making are intrin-
sically tied to the processes of archival construction, where certain
narratives are privileged and others marginalised through the active
reshaping by the archivist [62, 71, 74]. These usually invisible prac-
tices involved in the maintenance of archives, have ramifications
for the ways in which archival holdings are then (re)presented as
being a view from nowhere or of ‘all possible statements’ rather
than ‘the law of what can be said’ [6].
In contrast, Brown and Davis-Brown [10] focus on the ‘technical-
rational work’ of archivists - or the everyday decisions and practices
related to the collection and maintenance of archives. They char-
acterise a profession where the ‘explicitly political who is often
reduced to the technically instrumented how’ - a sentiment also
echoed by critical information studies [7], as well as practitioners
from within the web archiving field [76]. In light of this, an engage-
ment with the political nature of web archival practice would then
include an examination of what comes to count as the ‘professional
decision-making’ [10] involved in a host of activities that mark the
everyday tasks of (organisational) archivists.
The turn also ascribes the importance of unpicking digital in-
formation technologies and not falling into the trappings of either
equating them to analogue technologies, nor essentialising their
capabilities or potentialities for capturing the cultural record. Cook
[17], describes the impact of the transition to electronic archival
records and the role of postmodern critique in strengthening the
role of the archivist in the digital age:
We will move from databases to knowledge bases.
We will move, in the language of the post-modernists,
to re-contextualize our activities: we will reorient
ourselves from the content to the context, and
from the end result to the original empowering
intent, that is, from the artifact (the actual record)
to the creating processes behind it, and thus to the
actions, programmes, and functions behind those
processes [17, p.410-411].
Long Session V: Time, Space, Archives
WebSci ’17, June 25–28, 2017, Troy, NY, USA.
As such, archives can be further considered in light of the dig-
ital technologies that are intimately tied to both the production
and preservation of web resources. Waterton [75, p.653-654] and
others make the case for examining digital archives and the ‘gen-
erative capabilities’ of technologically-enabled data, information,
and knowledge which are in an ‘eternal process of becoming’ [33].
Questions are therefore raised regarding how prior conceptualisa-
tions of significance and potential use are manifested in the ways
in which digital ‘objects’ are collected and preserved. Pinch and
Henry [58]’s notion of the ‘materiality of knowledge’ is useful here
for considering the ways in which knowledge is also ‘embedded
in physical artefacts, technologies, and ways of doing things’. This
is manifested in how practice produces ‘material bodies’ [4, p.808-
809] but also how materiality is bound to and embedded in practice.
In this instance Barad [4] is referring to how the body (e.g. the
anatomy and physiology) actively contributes to the processes of
‘materialisation,’ but in the case of web archives it warrants an ex-
amination of how the materiality of technologies (platforms, tools,
interfaces, code, algorithms) is both implicated in the production
of archives but also potentially produced through practice.
In this theoretical context, we extend the focus on materiality
and practice, to include the role that labour plays in the produc-
tion and maintenance of web archives. Whereas practice embodies
the action, artefacts and tacit knowledge that gives meaning to
both [15]; labour is conceptualised here to encompass the work
it takes to produce and transform web archives into information
sources. To frame our analysis, we draw on Downey’s [23] concept
of ‘information labor’, or the human and algorithmic labour that
‘[enables] and [constrains] the constant circulation of information.’
Downey argues that a focus on information labour, particularly in
the context of media literacy, reveals the contingent ‘social rela-
tions’ that exist between information producers and consumers,
through the process of acknowledging the work of agents that are
often obscured by the technical arrangements of access. Here, by
acknowledging and exploring the interconnected collection and
maintenance work of both human agents (web archivists, engi-
neers, users) and non-human agents (algorithms, bots, code) in web
archiving, we open the doors for new enquiry into the value and
role of the work of web archivists in the production of knowledge.
3 METHODOLOGY
Ethnographic methods were chosen to document the routine ac-
tivities of archival practices and the ‘typical patterns of work’ [32,
p.169] through the use of observation, interviews and documen-
tary sources for understanding the day-to-day activities of web
archivists.
3.1 The Case for an Ethnographic Approach
An ‘upward trend’ has been observed in the use of ethnographic
methods in library and information science research [38]. Although
there are comparatively fewer examples of ethnographic methods
being used within the context of archives, ethnography has been
identified as a means for conducting in-depth, comparative and
cross-cultural studies of archival practice [49]. Gracy’s [31] ethno-
graphic work of archives provides the stimulus and methodological
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framework for an ‘archival ethnography’, or rather, the study of
archival practice in situ:
Archival ethnography is a form of inquiry which
positions the researcher within an archival envi-
ronment to gain the cultural perspective of those
responsible for the creation, collection, care and
use of records [30].
Specifically focused on record creation, other studies have used
ethnographic observation to understand archives as a form of
knowledge production in scientific laboratories [63]; to investi-
gate communication and organisational accountability in record-
keeping [79]; and to understand both the technical and the social
apparatuses that facilitate record creation and maintenance within
organisational contexts [73]. The motivations for these studies, as
well as their findings, have all emphasised the importance and ef-
fect of context on the production and management of the archival
record and reinforce the value of ethnographic methods for doc-
umenting situated practices and the wider interactions between
archivists, archival institutions and users of archives.
Ethnographic methods have been argued to enable a more ‘com-
plex’ appreciation of the development, use and role of technologies
in society - beyond a view of technologies as simply ‘functional in-
struments’ [59, p.110]. One key assumption of this research design
is that the direct observation of technologies and their use in web
archiving is central to understanding and documenting practices.
Suchman [69] provides relevant assistance here, defining technol-
ogy as ‘the assemblage of skilled practices and associated logics
characteristic of modern industrial societies’ and artefacts as the
‘material production of skilled practice’. This approach allows for
an exploration of the materiality of web archiving through a dis-
cussion of the relationship between practice and the production of
digital artefacts, as well as the role of the environment (the policies,
activities, infrastructure, and communities) that actively inform
them.
Our aim, clearly, is not to fetishise web archives as either tech-
nological objects or sociomaterial culture, a point mirrored in STS
debates which attend to the pitfalls of determinism and advocate
for the avoidance of reductionist conceptualisations of either social
or technical agents as essentially defined by the other [69, p.165].
Rather, we understand web archives as produced by an assemblage
that require attention be paid to both the structure and agency of
technical actors, as well as the sociocultural elements of technical
practices - as evidence for the ways in which ‘cultural values are
enacted, produced, shared, reified, represented and reaffirmed’ [22].
3.2 Data Collection and Analysis
A combination of interviews, observation records and documentary
sources were collected over a four week period in collaboration with
web archivists, engineers and managers at the Internet Archive.
Both organisational (for observations) and individual consent (for
interviews) were sought and received prior to data collection. In
accordance with this consent all individual participant names re-
ported here are pseudonyms.
Ethnographic interviews are a form of research interview that
are distinguished by not only the types of questions that are asked,
but also the ways in which the interviews are broken down into
Long Session V: Time, Space, Archives
Observing Web Archives
‘ethnographic elements’ or ‘speech acts’ designed to elicit specific
types of cultural responses from informants [65]. They were used
in combination with observation as a mechanism for developing
rapport with informants, as well as to clarify existing observation
records and focus subsequent observation activities. In an effort to
not to predetermine what practices were discussed, the interviews
took a largely unstructured approach using a combination of de-
scriptive, structural and contrasting questions in direct response
to the answers provided by informants within the context of the
interview. A number of participant-led ‘walkthroughs’ were un-
dertaken as part of the interviews in order to allow practitioners
to narrate their daily activities in real-time. In total, 16 interviews
were conducted with 11 staff members at the Archive. The length
of each interview varied, ranging from 20 minutes to over 2 hours,
all of which were audio recorded. Most interviews took place in
person, barring two which took place on Skype as the informants
worked remotely. All interview data were fully transcribed.
The purpose of ethnographic observations is to provide access to
‘practices and actions as they unfold’ [5, p.55], in the form of ‘non-
elicited data’ that can allow insights into the implicit and embodied
activities that form everyday life. This is predicated on the notion
that some actions cannot be articulated by participants/or ‘insiders’
through other research methods such as interviews. Boellstorff [5]
and others [53] have long argued that ‘elicitation methods’ (such
as interviews) cannot be a substitute for observation as there are
inherent differences and disconnects between what people do and
what they say they do. Furthermore, people do not always have
the perspective or ability to report on all aspects of the processes
(particularly cognitive processes) that underly the decisions and
activities that make up practice [53]. Observation therefore, of-
fers another window into understanding the relationship between
meaning and action in everyday practice.
Ethnographic records were made documenting participation ac-
tivities - including all-staff and tool development meetings, staff and
application training seminars, troubleshooting and quality assur-
ance tasks with participants - all with the aim of providing the basis
for ‘thick descriptions’ [24] of practices. Observation pro-forma
were not used, however ethnographic records were created for ob-
servations describing: what was done - action, activities, what was
made and used - ‘cultural artefacts’ and what was said - speech acts,
discursive activities [66, p.10-12]. Varying degrees of researcher
participation was undertaken as part of the observations (as deemed
appropriate by the host), where ‘passive’ participant observation
was used during staff meetings, more ‘active’ participant observa-
tion took place during workshop and community events held at the
Internet Archive.6
Documentary sources in various forms were collected to supple-
ment the observations and interviews. ‘Documents’ are used here
to refer to various types of materials (not just textual) produced by
organisations, communities and individuals to describe procedures,
policies and preferred ways of practicing web archiving. The use of
documentary sources here offers insights into aspects of (otherwise)
implicit knowledge that underlies practices [15, p.401].
6 For
a further breakdown of the types of participation levels common to participant
observation, see Spradley [66, p.58].
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Strategies for synthesising ethnographic data advocated by Spradley
[65] were used to develop the analytical themes. This involved the
identification of ‘things informants know’ in an effort to elicit every-
day practices through the various kinds of participant knowledge
(e.g. knowledge about crawl behaviours, scoping rules, reporting
tools) and their connections to ways of doing things (e.g. mainte-
nance and quality assurance tasks, de-duplication techniques). All
data were analysed together in order to identify common themes
present across the dataset. Lists and groupings were compiled by
repeatedly listening to the audio recordings, reading the transcripts
and observation records, and comparing the subject matter across
the data. The methods used provided the opportunity for mapping
heterogenous data and highlighted particular groupings of practi-
tioner knowledge and activities for further analysis. The themes
presented here are not exhaustive but rather, subjective and reflec-
tive of both the aims and current state of this research.
4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
In what follows we explore the theoretical framework described
above through an initial analysis of data collected from fieldwork
carried out at the Internet Archive (‘The Archive’). This is the re-
sult of four weeks spent at the Archive in October-November 2016
and February-March 2017. Before addressing the findings, some
background is provided to set the scene. Through the presentation
of findings that follows, the concept of web archival labour is ex-
amined and explored through the knowledge work, breakdown and
repair activities that shape web archiving at the Archive.
4.1 Site Background and Setting
In 1996, Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat established the Internet
Archive as a nonprofit organisation alongside Alexa Internet, a com-
mercial web indexing service [39]. The Internet Archive headquar-
ters are based in San Francisco, California, a state which officially
designated them a library in 2007 [37]. Since 1999, the Internet
Archive has expanded their holdings beyond archived web con-
tent to provide web-based access to both digitised and born-digital
resources, including but not limited to: books, audio, film/video,
images, documents, software and video games [78]. According to
web traffic statistics provided by Alexa Internet (now a subsidiary
of Amazon), the Internet Archive regularly ranks between the 250-
350th most visited website globally, with roughly 30% of search
engine results driven by users looking for the Wayback Machine.7
The Archive forms a central component of the web archiving
landscape through their provision of both large-scale web index-
ing and preservation services, as well as steering the direction
of standards and practice through the development of tools and
technologies that support web archiving at scale. The Archive is
widely considered the largest web archive in the world, containing
in excess of 15 petabytes of 270+ billion captures of web content
[27]. They are one of the few institutions to employ ‘exhaustive’
global web crawling, which harvests web resources both within
and beyond national domain boundaries or thematically-driven cap-
tures for the primary purpose of preservation (rather than indexing
for other search or commercially-driven purposes). The collection
of web archives at the Archive was originally (solely) facilitated
7 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/archive.org [Accessed: 3 February 2017]
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by the Alexa Internet ‘toolbar’, a browser-based plugin developed
for the purposes of improving early-web navigation and analyt-
ics [44, p.274]. Based on user navigation, the toolbar captures and
preserves each web page as it is visited, subsequently donating it
to the Archive with a six month access embargo (a practice that
continues to this day).
The Archive released the Heritrix web crawler as open source in
2002 alongside leading the development of the Wayback Machine
software which currently forms the predominant mechanism by
which users collect and access web archives. In 2006, the Archive
began supporting Archive-It, the widely used subscription-based
web archiving service. The Archive-It team work as part of the ‘web
group’ at the Archive, providing technical and storage support for
service subscribers and partner organisations. As such, this case
study offered the opportunity to observe some of the ways the
Archive-It team supports the development of tools and practice for
web archiving.
4.2 Mapping Practice Roles and Activities
The web archival activities of the Archive can be broken down
into three broad areas: crawling, access and tool development. The
Archive is engaged in crawling at many different levels and thus
this area includes the crawl activities that are self-directed, those
that are fully undertaken at the direction of other organisations and
those crawls that are initiated and directed by other organisations
using their subscription service Archive-It. The Archive facilitates
access and hosting for crawls undertaken by themselves and others
through the Wayback Machine, including the provision of tools
that allow others to deposit and donate their own WARCs to the
collection. And lastly they facilitate web archiving through their
ongoing tool and technology development for crawling and replay.
In practice, these three areas do not sit in isolation of one another
and represent a working environment of overlapping roles, tasks
and activities at the Archive. The work that makes up web archival
labour permeates each of these activity areas, explored further in
the following sections.
4.3 Knowledge Work: Crawling and Curating
Elsewhere, others have acknowledged a certain pre-occupation
with abundance and ‘plenitude’ at ‘universal archives’ such as the
Internet Archive, an observation which De Kosnik [19, p.95] ar-
gues implicitly denies, or at least distracts from, attention to any
selectivity in archiving. Although it is clear that the Archive is
overtly concerned with abundance and scale in their endeavours
to capture more, our observations point strongly towards efforts
on their part to increasingly shape and prioritise the web resources
that they capture. This point was made clear at the Archive’s 20th
Anniversary Party (2016) when Kahle announced that the Archive
had (at that point) archived ‘273 billion webpages from over 361
million websites’ with the help of robots and ‘1000 librarians.’ Here
and in an interview with Kahle, the Archive signals the creation
of the Archive-It subscription service as a significant step towards
archiving more selectively, by providing librarians with the tools
to save web resources. However, the selection narrative is more
complex than this, or as an informant indicated when I enquired
about the Archive’s appraisal practices: ‘the process is strategically
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mish-mashed.’ Collectively, these strategies (some of which are
discussed below) can be seen as one component of what Downey
[23] calls the ‘knowledge work’, or the ‘high value labour’ that goes
into the production of information that is obscured, or marketed
as either automated or infinite. The notion of knowledge work is
explored below as it relates to the curation of seed lists and what
one informant called the ‘hybrid’ crawling activities of the Archive.
One informant relayed that a common misconception about the
Archive’s crawling activities is that they employ ‘one giant crawler’
to archive the global Web.’8 This is repeated in research literature
and popular media articles around the perceived automation of
the Archive’s crawling activities. At any given moment, in fact,
the Archive has an (unknown) number of crawlers engaged in
selective archival activities. A key priority was to begin to map
these crawling events during fieldwork, in an effort to understand
each as a contingent, sociotechnical assemblage. These crawl events
or ‘crawl modalities’ [70] define what is collected in the Archive.
Each is shaped by different motivations, priorities and approaches
to web archiving.9
Looking further back in history to 2010, a moment of significance
can be observed when the Wayback team started engaging in and
directing their own global crawls. Several informants described the
motivations that led to this shift in direction, which was driven (at
least in part) by the perceived inadequacies of the crawl data that
were seeded, crawled and donated by Alexa Internet to the Archive.
The Alexa crawling approach10 is raised here as it is representative
of a historical focus on the popularity of sites as a factor in the
selection of seeds, one which (until recently) continued to influence
the ways in which crawls were prioritised - even in those crawls
directed by the Archive itself. The use of Alexa’s ‘top million’ sites as
the starting seeds for the ‘wide crawls’ (see below) was discussed as
a common place practice but often resulted in the over-prioritising
of popularity as an indicator of the value in capturing certain web
resources - with Gregory claiming that: ‘over 50% of our wide crawl
was from 2,000 websites.’ Further complaints were relayed about the
quality of Alexa crawls as they do not capture images or embedded
dynamic resources, often leading to web archives with extensive
missing elements.
Various crawl events have subsequently become associated with
the Archive’s global crawling efforts, including for example, the
‘survey crawls’ and ‘wide crawls.’ Survey crawls are being used to
supplement wide crawls by taking a snap shot of the home page of
every domain/host ever identified by the Archive. Wide crawls are
run twice a year over 4-6 months, though as Arthur described they
had originally envisaged the crawl cycle to run 4-6 times a year.
Wide crawls start from a seed list (initially the Alexa top million, as
described above) and are then allowed to run autonomously, the bot
8 personal communication
9 The term ‘crawl modality’ is borrowed from Summers and Punzalan [70] who in
a study of web archival appraisal practices describes the different ways in which
crawling activities were broadly conceptualised and implemented. Although different
(but overlapping) crawling modalities were identified at the Archive, the focus is
similarly on determining how these modalities come to pass and how they shape what
is collected.
10 The mechanisms behind Alexa’s crawlers were presented by informants as not
fully understood, and based on a historical understanding of ‘how they used to work.’
The proprietary nature of their crawlers and the resulting crawl data were flagged
as an impediment to ever fully understanding the provenance of how resources are
prioritised over others within this data.
Long Session V: Time, Space, Archives
Observing Web Archives
following each outlink until ‘it doesn’t produce any interesting data
any more.’ When asked how wide crawls were stopped, Arthur said
they have to regularly check on each Heritrix instance by manually
go into the machine in question and looking at the logs to see what
is actually being captured, a process they described as ‘daunting.’
Alex described what they were looking for when they examine
the logs, which largely involves a visual inspection of the domain
names contained within the capture URLs, watching out for strings
that resemble ‘calendar traps,’ pornography and endless Facebook
sites. In direct result of some of the manual labour required to
shape and monitor the large-scale crawls at the Archive, engineers
began developing various ad-hoc tools to mitigate the need for
interacting with the harvester logs and other shell scripts. One such
tool is something Arthur calls the ‘Domain Browser tool’ used in
conjunction with Hericrawler, a crawl queue management system
the Archive developed for orchestrating large-scale crawls:
The domain browser manual tool is for identify-
ing undesirable domains. It’s used to establish and
prioritise ‘shades of gray,’ for example only crawl
this site if there are no other sites to crawl. It’s
used as a ranking mechanism for prioritising do-
mains based on time, resources and place in the
queue, as certain important URLs can get blocked
by many instances of unimportant URLs. For ex-
ample people linking to Facebook pictures can
create an infinite loop of queued Facebook links
because of the nature of the graph. These types of
sites are really slow to crawl as they are hosted on
a single site, which must be crawled in succession
because of the nature of the Heritrix crawler. Each
domain/host is assigned a budget and the crawler
is paused if it reaches its budget.
The Domain Browser tool is thus used to (manually) curate
undesired domains based on a visual inspection of a gallery of
home page thumbnails of each domain/host. The tool is set up to
facilitate users tagging the site as pornography, a domain squatter
or ‘link farm’ in order to remove it from subsequent crawls. Alex
describes the process:
What we did was hired half a dozen people - they
would just go through it and get the top 30,000
hosts [...] and they go through 4-5,000, that’s what
one person can do in a month or so. And then
we get actual human interaction to say yes, this
is a good website. And then we would delete or
modify or prioritise based on that input. So having
humans actually spend a little bit of time at the top
really helped. We’d love to do it further of course.
In addition, Arthur described another similar manual tool called
‘Live Update’ that they use to curate new domains that are discov-
ered through their Wordpress crawls (crawls that are triggered by
edits to sites hosted on Wordpress.com). Different to the Domain
Browser tool, the Live Update tool dynamically displays the do-
main/host thumbnail of new domains in realtime allowing users to
choose between overlay buttons tagged ‘P’ for pornography, and
‘F’ for link farms, or visit the site for further investigation. Arthur
said it was developed in an effort to ‘gamify’ the process of curation
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and described using the tool whenever he had downtime. When
asked how to spot a link farm, Arthur responded that ‘it’s obvious,
there’s usually a giant box [iframe] with keywords and a list of do-
mains on the home page, easy to spot.’ The use of manual curation
tools reveals both the role of human intervention in the process of
curating millions of links and the tensions and trade-offs that exist
between the use of bots and a desire to capture ‘high quality’ sites.
In response to the restrictive number of URLs collected by the
wide crawls seeded with the Alexa ‘top million’ sites, several in-
formants described some of the Archive’s more recent efforts to
study the wide crawls through a grant they received to improve
the Wayback Machine in various respects. One such study of wide
crawl 12 is captured in a grant milestone report (that was made
available) which describes the various techniques used and makes
recommendations for improving future crawls. Here Gregory de-
scribes the process of studying the hyperlink structure of existing
archives to seed crawls:
I do a lot of link analysis where I study the hyper-
link structure of our crawls and try to figure out
in certain pockets, use some rank methodologies
to figure out ‘oh these are important resources,’
for instance they have a lot of links to them or
traffic is really high - let’s seed the crawl with
those. The most recent wide crawl I took the most
linked to pages from every single website, so 230
million websites [...] and instead of crawling the
Alexa top million, let’s crawl this bit. Sort of like a
hybrid survey and wide model [...]. And we found
resources that we had never crawled before. I’m
not saying one is better than the other, I’m saying
that hybridising this process might be one way of
balancing the scales a little bit.
This type of link analysis thus assists in finding the edge nodes of
websites that the crawlers have identified - sometimes upwards of 60
million sites - but do not get around to crawling before the crawl is
stopped. These are then used as seeds for the survey crawl (to crawl
the home pages of the sites) and to iteratively expand the net and
number of websites captured by the Archive. Gregory indicates that
through these types of studies, they estimate that at any given time
they are only crawling around 20% of the Web. Gregory structures
the issues surrounding balance in selection priorities as a problem
of resources (a theme which repeatedly arises), but outlines three
considerations for determining ‘better crawls’ and ensuring they
are crawling the right 20%:
The way I think of it [...] there’s three branches,
there’s popularity, there’s novelty and there’s the
risk of going away. How do you achieve that bal-
ance? You want to get stuff that people are using -
not just junk that is on the Web that you’re just
filling up the servers with that won’t ever be found
useful, like calendar pages, things like that, crap
[...] - there’s no novelty. It’s new? We want to make
sure it’s preserved because it just came out, it’s a
new article, it’s a new website. And then there’s
the risk of going away [...] - if you’re going to shut
down this service - Vine is going away - we jump
Long Session V: Time, Space, Archives
WebSci ’17, June 25–28, 2017, Troy, NY, USA.
in and crawl. So as we’re crawling the Web can we
do a good job of sort of achieving that balance? We
don’t quite know what the solution is to achieving
that balance.
If we expand the picture to look at some of the other crawl
modalities of the Archive, the multi-faceted approach to selection
becomes even more apparent. A number of techniques for selecting
domain/hosts were described by participants associated with the
Archive’s contract crawling, or the custom and domain-level crawl-
ing undertaken on behalf of partner institutions. A manager, Elaine
described the use of zone files, partner-submitted seed lists (via
Google spreadsheets or forms), links embedded in particular social
media streams, and using geographical look-ups of existing content
held by the Archive to extract relevant domains for crawling. Other
sources for selection include ‘listening in’ on Twitter to determine
which YouTube videos get linked to, as well as what outlinks get
added to Wikipedia - both of which trigger crawl events. Increas-
ingly, the Archive has also been developing a variety of tools that
use their longstanding ‘Save Page Now’ feature to promote the
saving of web resources to the Wayback Machine by anyone with
access to the archive.org home page, or a Firefox plugin.
These methods highlight some of the ways the Archive is lever-
aging the power and labour of ‘the crowds’ - through the users of
Twitter, Wikipedia and Save Page Now - to not only diversify and
‘balance’ the domains/types of resources that are archived, but also
(implicitly) co-opt and transform these users into potential stake-
holders. Furthermore, the Archive is in multiple ways, leveraging
the web archives amassed in the Wayback Machine project over
the last 20 years to continuously increase their net resources.
4.4 Breakdown and Repair: Maintaining
Archives
Many informants described scenarios where human mediation was
required in either otherwise (seemingly) automated processes. Ex-
amples that require manual intervention include: running patch
crawls when bots failed to crawl designated seeds, or in the event
of a crawler trap where bots are trapped in an infinite loop of seed
requests (discussed above), or when missing or altered elements are
observed in the playback of archived web pages. Fundamentally,
each of these boil down to issues surrounding either the capture or
replay of web resources. Borrowing from Star and Ruhleder [67],
these moments could be considered a form of breakdown which
in turn reveals the contingent assemblage of processes that for
example, enable the capture of intended web resources or provide
‘high fidelity’ access to the archived collections.
The issues around the quality assurance of collection capture
and playback is not an unknown dimension of web archival prac-
tice, however, the processes that are undergone to mitigate these
issues are not well documented. Here we draw on the work of
Jackson [36] who advocates for an examination of the moments of
breakdown, repair and maintenance of technologies, in that they
redirect attention to the act and ‘ethics of care’ and embody the
creation of value by their maintainers. In other words, the practice
and processes involved in fixing and maintaining technologies can
be used as evidence for their worth by those who sustain these
practices over time. These moments of repair in web archiving are
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present throughout the study, including the repair and maintenance
of crawl data and crawling technologies, Wayback and access tools,
as well as the repair of broken links on the live Web by the Archive.
Some of these practices are discussed further below, as they high-
light some of the factors that influence the decision-making and
technical processes that enable the repair of web archives (and the
technologies that enable access).
A few training sessions for a web archivist on the Archive-It team,
Karen were observed. Through listening to Karen’s Q&A with other
team members, certain junctures were highlighted where support
staff are regularly required to prioritise activities, particularly in
response to the ‘quality’ or ‘completeness’ of web archives (and as
raised by partner organisations). To set the scene a bit, we draw on
interpretive notes following an observation session:
In the second session we all sat on the couch in the
pit. Lydia asked Karen if she wanted to continue
the training they began in the morning, which was
aimed at addressing a recent support request that
came in from a partner. When the conversation got
a bit technical - as a result of Karen asking increas-
ingly detailed questions about how certain seeds
and test crawls are rendered in playback - Mike (a
support engineer) was called over by Lydia. Mike
walked over and leaned on the couch and began to
explain some common differences between capture
and playback issues. The consensus from Lydia and
Mike seems to be that the first task in the support role
is to determine whether the issue is related to cap-
ture or playback. Karen is concerned about waiting
to solve issues based on partner requests, advocating
for the team to be more actively QA’ing collections in
case they are at risk of disappearing. Mike responds
that there are different issues at play (including time
and resources) and that it’s key to understand that
capture issues will always take precedent over play-
back issues - for exactly that reason.
From this vignette several points can be interpreted. First, we
can see that Karen is getting to grips with a key aspect of the role of
the web archivist at Archive-It, which (in conjunction with support
engineers) is to determine the difference between playback and col-
lection issues and respond accordingly. Second, the comment that
capture problems will always trump replay problems is insightful. It
emphasises the goal of capture and reflects the underlying motiva-
tion driving activities - the fear of disappearance. This observation
also emphasises the active role of the web archivist and support
engineer in the processes that shape the ‘fidelity’ of web archives.
They are implicitly driven by time and resource constraints but
they are also active participants in the practice of choosing which
support issues are prioritised. Mike indicated that specific repair
tasks are prioritised in each daily ‘stand-up’ where team members
report on upcoming development goals. Web archivists and pro-
gramme managers will mark tasks as high priority either because
the content is at risk of changing or going way or because the
request comes from a high priority partner (as both were the case
for the whitehouse.gov and End of Term archives that were being
captured at the time).
Long Session V: Time, Space, Archives
Observing Web Archives
5 SUMMARY AND FUTURE WORK
The aims of the paper were to examine how web archives are struc-
tured by the practices associated with collecting and maintaining
archives. The use of an ethnographic approach, with a focus on ob-
serving practice as web archival labour at the Internet Archive has
revealed a number of insights. The data points towards a complex
system of knowledge and maintenance work for prioritising which
web assets to collect and repair. The Archive is leveraging their
extensive existing archives for understanding networked linking
behaviour in an effort to balance the breadth and depth of crawling
activities, while discovering new sources for identifying websites
to crawl based on measures of popularity, ‘novelty’ and sites that
are endanger of going offline. The team has devised multiple mech-
anisms for identifying different types of ‘undesirable domains,’
including rule-based link pattern-matching and the development
of ‘gamified’ tools for the manual curation of sites.
Collectively, the efforts of the Archive can be seen as knowledge
work, and these activities, seen in combination with other prac-
tices around the prioritisation, repair and maintenance of tools and
archives all have ramifications for how web resources are trans-
formed for use. It is the labour of non/human agents that enables
the preservation and ingestion of information from the Web into
the Archive, and then once again back to the Web where archives
are reassembled via the Wayback Machine. Although imperfect,
this labour is increasingly recognised as an essential element of
the web architecture. The information labour and knowledge work
of potential web archival users is therefore intimately tied to the
web archival labour of the Internet Archive. As the global Wayback
Machine currently provides access to billions of webpages - often
inaccessible elsewhere - editorial decisions have implications for
not only the fidelity of archived captures, but indeed whether or
not certain parts of the Web are preserved at all. Future work will
aim to address any shortcomings in the ethnographic methods pre-
sented by further examining the labour of algorithmic and other
non-human actors (e.g. hyperlinks, software) implicated in these
processes. By continuing to make these practices visible, both the
contingencies and value of this labour are revealed and open a new
window on this increasingly vital activity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by the UK Engineering and Physical
Sciences Research Council and the Web Science Centre for Doctoral
Training, Grant No. EP/G036926/1. The authors would also like to
thank the Internet Archive and staff for opening their doors and
being so generous with their time and feedback.
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